News flash: crime is complex.
As Benjamin Disraeli might have said, and Mark Twain famously attributed to him anyway, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Crime reporting in the US likely checks all three boxes.
Still, the news this year is good. Murder is down - perhaps by the greatest margin ever:
The nationwide murder rate fell dramatically in 2025 — in what’s likely the largest single-year drop ever recorded, according to new crime data.
Killings in the US plunged nearly 20% compared to last year, following a COVID-era spike in violence, according to the Real-Time Crime Index.
In total, there were 5,912 murders recorded in the US between January and October 2025, compared to 7,369 during the same time period in 2024.
That's on top of a 15% drop between 2023 and 2024.
The numbers are pretty encouraging: murders are down 16% in Minneapolis, 19% in Los Angeles, 20% in New York City, and 28% in both Chicago and the District of Columbia.
So, to what do we attribute the drop?
Well, that's where we're getting into Mark Twain's turf.
Could it be better enforcement?
Democrats didn’t believe this was possible:
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) December 25, 2025
Murders are down near nearly 20%, the largest one year drop on record.
Turns out that arresting criminals and deporting illegal aliens helps lower crime. pic.twitter.com/Ug53kF0zSr
That certainly must help - but many of those blue cities still have Soros-funded prosecutors who will go to superhuman contortions to avoid sending criminals to jail.
Looking at those numbers in DC and Chicago, it's tempting to say the National Guard moving into the District, and threatening to do it in Chicago, may have had something to do with it; the handing Trump a PR win is certainly enough to motivate even the bluest of politicians (Tim Walz didn't get serious about sending the National Guard into Minneapolis during the George Floyd riots until Trump threatened, perhaps absurdly, to send the 82nd Airborne).
And indeed, Trump and Republicans "pouncing" on the numbers certainly triggers Big Left.
🚨 HUGE WIN: America’s homicide rate just hit the lowest level in modern history under President Trump and Director Kash Patel’s FBI.
— Victoria Byrne (@Thevictoria76) November 28, 2025
A staggering 25% drop — exactly why we voted for strong leadership.
Let cops be cops. Keep America safe. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/1ENEiEKPF4
I mean, the material is all right there:
"Long story short," concluded Arthur, "Trump II has the will prior administrations lacked to enforce the law in the interior, has a large population of removable aliens to choose from (thanks to non-enforcement under Biden), has the detention space to hold them (thanks to the Big…
— Byron York (@ByronYork) December 24, 2025
National Public Radio will have none of that talk. And they may have a point, at least when it comes to nationwide patterns:
During 2020 and 2021, homicide rates surged across the U.S. Now the nation is simply on the other side of that surge.
"There was a wide array of stresses — economic, financial, psychological — that the pandemic produced," said Adam Gelb, president of the Council on Criminal Justice, which researches criminal justice policies. "And there were greater opportunities to settle beefs with rivals, precisely because there were fewer people on the streets and fewer cops on the streets."...[John Roman, who directs the Center on Public Safety & Justice at NORC, a research group at the University of Chicago], says it's helpful to think of violence as an epidemic. More crime leads to more crime, and less leads to less, just like more instances of a virus can lead to more people becoming infected.
"If epidemics cause things to spiral up, they should create virtuous cycles on the way down," he said. "The fewer serious crimes there are, the more resources law enforcement has to investigate each crime."
This passes the "do you believe your lying eyes" test: crime where i live bounced from fairly placid lows ten years ago to a thirty year high during the pandemic, when schools were closed, when gangs were employing idle teens to jack cars, and when panicky rhetoric rubbed off on people in ways that are unpredictable only if you've never studied the faintest shred of human nature.
Of course, being NPR, they've got to advocate for government spending:
Between March and May 2020, the local government workforce in the U.S. shrank by around 10%. Now, local government jobs have rebounded.
That's it. Unemployed government workers were doing the shooting.
Take a tour through the stats. TL;DR: There's something there for everyone.
Except gun control advocates.
